Through the Immigrant Artist Project (IAP), the New York Foundation for the Arts is building and serving a community of artists with diverse backgrounds who share the experience of immigration. We connect artists with services and resources to foster their creative careers, gain support and exposure for their work, and integrate into the cultural world of New York and beyond while upholding their distinct identities.

The freeCon Edison IAP Newsletter is sent out via email and posted online every month. The newsletter lists information on upcoming opportunities and events of particular interest to immigrant artists but open to all. We also feature an artist or an arts/immigrant services organization, and helpful tips for professional development. Additionally, there are new sections on helpful tips translated into different languages as well as the Mentoring Alumni Corner to highlight the achievements and activities of past mentees of our Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists.

Cultural Community Events expand the accessibility of the Immigrant Artist Project by offering instructional workshops, seminars, and panels on themes responsive to the needs of immigrant artists. Some topics include grant writing, legal services and marketing. To present these programs, we partner with cultural, advocacy, social and immigrant service organizations throughout New York City. This approach cultivates and strengthens a network of advocates and service providers for immigrant artists.

The Individual Consultation Initiative provides immigrant artists with practical and professional advice from an arts professional who has extensive experience in supporting artists in the areas of visual and performing arts. Each in-person appointment is $30 for a 30-minute session.

The Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists pairs emerging foreign-born artists with artists who have received a NYFA Fellowship. The mentors interact with their mentees one-on-one for a period of six months, guiding them in achieving specific goals and providing them with broader access to the New York cultural world through an exchange of ideas, resources and experiences. The program helps immigrant artists build some necessary skills to fairly compete as professional artists in New York.

The NYFA Folk Artist Development Program helps senior members of immigrant communities build professional skills and resources to carry forward their traditional art forms. It is open to traditional artists of the material and/or performing arts. We build the capacity of participants through seminars, workshops, and individual consultations. We also provide them with the opportunity to showcase their traditions in demonstrations and performances for diverse audiences at various sites in the NYC area. Artists are provided a $100 stipend for their participation in the program.

In this cartoon, an Irishman and a Chinese man are devouring Uncle Sam. Ultimately, the Chinese man consumes them both and steals the Irishman’s hat.

There was a time in America when the Irish were characterized as apes, Italians as street filth, and Chinese as parasitic locusts. Today, these groups are key tiles in the American mosaic, but their arrival was initially met with fear and opposition. Newspapers and magazine cartoons from the turn of the 20th century illustrate these sentiments.

Many of these images were originally published in humor magazines such as Puck and The Wasp. Though modern-day viewers might see them as racist propaganda, perhaps in their time they functioned more as political satire. Think of Stephen Colbert and his hyperbolic, politically incorrect Chinese caricature, Ching Chong Ding Dong. One hundred years from now, people watching Colbert Report archives might misinterpret the comedy as something more sinister.

But it is safe to say there was a more sinister attitude toward immigrants in the country at the turn of the 20th century. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it government policy to restrict an ethnic group’s ability to enter the country. In 1896, an Atlantic author called immigrants”a hopeless burden” that would dilute the industriousness of the nation. In 1917, the Immigration Act barred a whole range of individuals – including the illiterate, the “feeble minded,” and homosexuals – from entering the country. Many of the images in this gallery echo these fears and portray immigrants, particularly the Chinese and the Irish, as parasites devouring what Americans hold dear.

Regardless of these measures and sentiments, the immigrants saw the America as an ark of refuge, as the last image in this gallery shows. And although these images are hundred years old, a lot of the conversation on immigration remains the same. Today, immigrants – mostly from Latin America – have a similar dream to those who sought refuge in the 1900s. And many Americans have similar fears about what role, if any, these American hopefuls should play.

The article by Brian Resnick (with many examples of images) in The Atlantic.

Photographer Łukasz Baksik (born in 1975) is primarily interested in documentary photography. All of his previous projects (e.g. Main Course Polish Style, Ordering a Beer, or The People of Nowy Square) contained a crucial social component. For many years Łukasz Baksik has been documenting Jewish cemeteries in Poland.

Embellished with symbols and inscriptions, Jewish tombstones convey information about the life of people, families and entire shtetls (towns). How many matzevot were there before the World War II at the 1,200 Jewish cemeteries in Poland? This is a question, which nobody can answer today. The number may have reached a few hundred thousand or a few million.

More than four hundred Jewish cemeteries did not survive the war times. They were rearranged to provide sites for housing estates, sports fields, garbage dumps or sand quarries. The sand mined from them to build houses was mixed with human remains. Only a hundred and fifty graveyards still have more than a hundred gravestones.

During the World War II the Nazi occupants used matzevot to pave the courtyards of their new buildings, to lay roads or erect walls. Poles continued this infamous practice after the war. Matzevot were used, for instance, to line a water pool for fire fighters, a railway embankment or a riverbank. They were used as building material for furnaces, flooring and road curbs. A visitor will find hundreds of grinding wheels made of matzevot, many of them still bearing Hebrew inscriptions.

The excibition “Matzevot for Everyday Use” forms part of 22 Jewish Culture Festival which takes place in Krakow – Poland from 29 of June until 8 of July 2012.